The morning air was thick with mist, muffling the usual sounds of the Mercenary compound.
I stood in front of the training posts. Today, I decided to try something new, to see if my deeply buried muscle memory would recognize something other than brute force.
I walked over to the wooden racks lining the edge of the courtyard, where the Company kept dull, battered practice weapons.
I picked up a heavy, one-handed training hammer. It had a short iron haft and a thick counterbalance. I took a few practice swings, realizing how easily it allowed me to strike with devastating force while keeping my left hand completely free for somatic gestures. I set it down and picked up a training rapier, testing its delicate balance. Every weapon had trade-offs. A hammer was for crushing plate armor and breaking bones, but a blade was necessary for slipping past a parry and piercing exposed joints or unarmored throats.
I spent an hour cycling through the racks, letting my body evaluate the loadouts that suited my emerging style. My ideal setup, I concluded, would be a heavy one-handed war hammer and a piercing blade at my belt.
But a proper armory like that would cost more silver than I had ever seen.
For now, I walked back to the post and picked up my long-handled smithing hammer. I would have to adapt. I choked up on it, sliding my right hand higher up the shaft. It drastically reduced my striking distance and cost me the mechanical advantage of a long swing, but it increased my speed. More importantly, my left hand remained free, hovering near my hip, fingers slightly curled, ready to pull mana.
I spent an hour practicing the transition: block with the haft, step inside the guard, and thrust two fingers forward. A hollow, silent strike followed by an imaginary flash of fire or lightning.
It was a start. But if I was going to survive Greyve, I needed more than just a free left hand. I needed to know the rules of the board I was playing on.
* * *
After lunch I decided to ask Aldric about my possible future in the Mage Guild.
It took me half an hour of bureaucratic wrangling and flashing my Mercenary token to get past the clerk, and only because I specifically invoked Aldric's name and mentioned "an atmospheric mana anomaly." The paranoid old mage apparently had standing orders to be informed of any such phenomena.
This time I found him in a cramped, poorly ventilated third-floor laboratory. Aldric was hunched over a brass astrolabe, muttering rapidly to himself.
"Ah, the blank slate," Aldric said, not looking up as I closed the heavy oak door. "Have you come to tell me the sky over the eastern farms is tearing open?"
"No," I said, leaning my hammer against the stone wall. "I came to find out how to officially register as a mage."
Aldric finally looked up. He adjusted the thick lenses of his spectacles, blinking at me as if I had just spoken a dead language.
"Are you serious?"
"I have a denunciation hanging over my head," I explained calmly, keeping my voice low. "A veteran in my Company intends to file a report that I'm an unregistered spell-caster operating illegally, plus I made something that made me more vulneruable. My Captain informed me that if it goes to the Magistrate, I will be handed over to the Academy. I want to know the legal countermeasure. I want to register and get a license."
Aldric stared at me for three agonizingly long seconds. Then, he threw his head back and laughed. It was a harsh, dry, barking sound that echoed terribly in the cramped stone room.
He leaned against his workbench, wiping a tear from his eye. "Didn't I explain you already?"
"Explain the process in detail," I said.
Aldric sighed, his amusement fading into bitter cynicism. "Fine. First, you present yourself to the Guild Registry and declare your intent. They will evaluate your lineage. Because you don't have one, you will require a noble sponsor to vouch for your bloodline and financial solvency."
He held up a second wrinkled finger.
"If, by some miracle, you find an aristocrat willing to tie his reputation to an amnesiac Mercenary, you will then be required to pay the standard Guild filing fee for a First Circle license. Five gold pieces."
Five gold. I had exactly three silver coins to my name. It was an astronomical barrier, a financial moat explicitly designed to keep the poor and the unconnected from ever holding official power.
"Let's assume I find five gold," I said, though the proposition was laughable. "What then?"
"Then," Aldric said, his voice dropping to a serious, hollow tone, "you take the Vow of the Academy. You legally sign away your independence. You become subject exclusively to Guild Law. After that they dictate what you can study, who you can heal, who you can fight, and which noble house you will serve. And if you step out of line, they don't throw you in a cell. They invoke the Rite of Tranquility. A neat little magical lobotomy that strips your ability to draw mana and leaves you a highly obedient scribe for the rest of your unnaturally long life."
I stared at the intricate brass instruments scattered across his desk. The system was airtight. The game was rigged.
Aldric stepped closer, his eyes narrowing with sudden, intense scientific curiosity.
"You cast that fire spell the other day without a vocal trigger," Aldric said softly. "You did it entirely on kinetic memory. I've been thinking about it constantly. It's fascinating."
He gestured around the cluttered, windowless room.
"I can offer you an alternative to the Magistrate's noose. Hide here. In the sub-basements of the Guild. The local guards and your Mercenary rivals won't dare cross our threshold. You can become my absolute, unrestricted test subject. We map your neural pathways, document how your body channels mana without theoretical foundation. I'll keep you fed and completely safe from Greyve."
He said it with genuine excitement, completely unaware of the horrifying implications of his offer.
I looked at the old man. I looked at the heavy lock on the heavy oak door. Cages came in rusted iron, and cages came in comfortable velvet.
"I appreciate the offer, Aldric," I said, picking up my hammer. "But I think I prefer my chances in the mud."
* * *
The reality of my situation weighed heavily on me as I walked out of the Upper Quarter and back down into the sprawling, chaotic market square.
I was scanning the crowds, automatically tracking hands and faces, when a familiar silhouette caught my eye.
A man in a battered canvas coat and a wide-brimmed felt hat was standing at a spice merchant's stall. Silas.
He was casually counting out copper coins for a bundle of dried fever-root and a brass mortar.
I adjusted my grip on my hammer and angled through the pressing crowd, stepping up right beside him.
"Fever-root?" I asked quietly, not looking directly at him. "Do the dead catch colds?"
Silas didn't flinch. He slowly finished tying the small burlap sack and picked it up.
"And here I thought lightning never struck the same place twice," Silas murmured, his eyes hidden beneath the brim of his hat.
"I need to know how you operate in the city without the Guild hanging you," I said, keeping my voice low. "How do you make money? And what was that deal you were offering?"
Silas looked up. He scanned the crowd. To my left, a pair of City Watch guards in blue tabards were slowly patrolling the market aisle, their halberds resting on their shoulders.
Silas's posture instantly shifted. He leaned backward, adopting an expression of shocked, offended innocence.
"Magic? Deals?" Silas said, his voice carrying clearly over the din of the market. Several heads turned toward us. "Good sir, you must have mistaken me for some back-alley charlatan! I am but a humble herbalist and healer. I cure sheep of the mange, I don't barter in witchcraft!"
He tipped his hat aggressively at me. "Good day to you, sir!"
He turned and slipped into the thickest part of the moving crowd. Within three seconds, the canvas coat vanished completely behind the flow of bodies.
I stood there, surrounded by the smell of roasting meats and cheap perfume, feeling an intense, cold frustration settling into my bones.
* * *
That night, the barracks were noisy with drinking and dice games, but I sat quietly on my cot, locked inside my own head.
I laid the three silver coins on my blanket and stared at them.
The legal path to survival was gated by five gold pieces and aristocratic patronage. The noble houses and the Mages' Guild had built a massive, unbreakable wall around power. I had none of the necessary currency—neither gold, nor reputation, nor time.
Which left only the illegal paths.
I engaged in a cold, emotionless analysis of the urban criminal economy. If society drafted laws that forced my execution, society's laws no longer warranted my respect.
How could I generate five gold pieces?
Option one: Fencing illegal magical artifacts or stolen Academy scrolls on the black market. Highly lucrative, but I had neither the capital to procure them nor the underworld connections to sell them without getting robbed or stabbed.
Option two: Violent extortion. Offering "protection" services to the criminal syndicates operating in the poorest slums of Ashford, utilizing my magic to intimidate rivals. Ugly, brutal, and guaranteed to eventually bring heavy retaliation.
Option three: Highway robbery. Stepping outside the city and hitting merchant caravans before they reached the gates.
Every single option carried the very real risk of the executioner's block. They were dirty, bloody paths that required me to completely abandon whatever morals I might have once possessed.
Yet, looking at the cruel mathematics of my situation, slitting a merchant's throat on the road seemed statistically more viable than earning five gold pieces through honest copper bounties.
I realized, with absolute clarity, that I was fully capable of doing it. I didn't feel revulsion at the thought of robbery or violence. I was an empty vessel, and the only imperative filling it was survival.
And Greyve was still the most immediate threat. Killing him was still the cleanest play on the board.
I swept the three silver coins back into my leather pouch and lay down. I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
* * *
The dawn air was sharp and cold.
I had drawn an early morning solo patrol, checking the perimeter stakes set up a half-mile outside the southern gates of the city. The grass was wet with dew, and my boots were soaked within minutes.
I reached the tree line, marking the edge of a thick grove of pines, when a figure holding an unlit wooden pipe stepped out from behind a massive trunk.
It was Silas.
He didn't have his exaggerated buffoonish posture from the market. He stood perfectly straight, leaning casually against the bark, his eyes sharp and serious. The mask was gone.
"You walk loudly for a man who seeks quietness," Silas said, striking a sulfur match against a stone and lighting his pipe. He puffed twice, a cloud of sweet-smelling white smoke billowing around his hat.
I stopped ten feet away. "You ran away yesterday."
"I am a survivalist," Silas corrected mildly. "You engaged me in a public forum, twenty feet from registered Watchmen, while asking about unregulated magic. You're lucky I didn't yell for them to arrest you for attempting to buy illegal hexes."
He took the pipe from his mouth and looked at me, tilting his head slightly. His eyes seemed to pierce right through my leather Mercenary armor, analyzing the tension in my shoulders.
"I saw you walking out of the Mages' Guild yesterday afternoon," Silas said softly. "You looked exactly like a man who just found out the front door is made of solid iron and the lock assumes you're a beggar."
He smiled.
"The system is built by rich men, for rich men, Marshal. They want you digging in the dirt for coppers until you die. They certainly don't want you accessing the fundamental power of the universe."
Silas pointed the stem of his pipe toward the dark woods behind him.
"Fortunately, I prefer the basement window. And I have the key." He locked eyes with me. "Are you ready to stop playing by their rules?"
I looked at the city walls behind me, thinking of Greyve, the five gold pieces, and Aldric's velvet cage.
"Yes," I said.
Silas grinned, a true, slightly unhinged smile. "Excellent. Follow me."